This course will present an overview of current research on
discourse both from a theoretical and empirical point of view. I
will begin with the theoretical point of view, concentrating on
Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT), which has made
most explicit the ties between discourse semantics and more
traditional linguistic fields of pragmatics and semantics. I
will also compare RST, DLTag and other theories to SDRT. I then
will detail the empirical stumbling block for all of these
theories, which is the scaling up to real world, domain
independent texts. I will review empirical approaches to
discourse parsing in an attempt to address this empirical
problem. I will discuss corpus construction and learning
methods, leaning on the results of the Penn Discourse Tree Bank,
Graph Bank, and the SDRT annotation projects DISCOR and ANNODIS.